Category — General

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Freebase : Sign In:
Free + Database = Freebase
It’s about film, sports, politics, music, science and everything else all connected together. Our contributors are collecting data from all over the internet to build a massive, collaboratively-edited database of cross-linked data. Its a big job and we’re just getting started.

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Freebase… its a free online database. this could be handy for all kinds of data sharing.

If MSFT had designed vi:
A funny posting from Sun&#8217;s Marigan&#8217;s blog (thanks Don).

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hehehehe

Digital Humanities: Expert Seminars:
Here is a list of podcast-seminars undertaken by the Methods Network at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities here at King&#8217;s. And don&#8217;t you just love the Internet; it means that you don&#8217;t have to attend all these seminars.
http://www.methodsnetwork.ac.uk/podcast/methnet-podcast.xml

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some great content on digital humanities.

unfiction.com » online tools:
online tools

this is a solid collection of tools that some of you might find useful, for instance an anagram finder and some steganography tools… along with some basic reference items and converters

Why Google’s universal library is an assault on human identity:
Why Google’s universal library is an assault on human identity. How’s that for a headline? Andrew Keen pull sno punches in this short ZDNet blog post. “John Updike put it best in his response to Kevin Kelly’s notorious 2006 New York Times magazine piece about Google’s universal library. For some of us,” Updike said. “Books are intrinsic to our human identity.” Exactly. So, by undermining the autonomy of the stand-alone book, Google’s vast database of indexed content is actually a blooming assault on human identity
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so… mr. updike believes that …. books are intrinsic to our human identity… thus it must follow that before there were books, there were no human identities?

I don’t think access to knowledge is an assault on human identity. it is an assualt on traditions and institutional forms, but that is nothing new. the book and everything behind it, is an institutionalized form of knowledge, it creates a wide variety of social disparities in relation to access to knowledge, including encouraging some of the current forms of anti-intellectualism… people have learned to dislike books and what books represent, as much as people have learned to love them. we just need to be careful when we think about these things.

E-Learning Resource Collection: Second Life:
E-LEARNING RESOURCE COLLECTION Second Life

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This is a start of a growing list of e-learning resources in second life. the other great place to look is the simteach wiki.

Sarah Davies: Intellectual Property Legislation With Human Rights:
I’m very interested in the whole notion of open content and Creative Commons licensing in the nonprofit space. Recently, I discovered Sarah Davies of FreedomforIP and after listening to her elevator pitch online from the Ignite Seattle event, I asked her for an interview. She told me, “I probably don’t have to mention this to you, but you are of course free to put this under a public domain, BY or BY-SA license.” Of course, I couldn’t imagine doing otherwise!
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i’m a sarah davies fan…. she’s on the right track.

Link Dump:
A few pointers to work on little-known, -recognized, and/or -understood aspects of whatever we’re doing when we’re not necessarily reading but — for lack of a better way to say it — just generally doing things with stories that whose endings might come sooner or later than we want them to (but never, it seems, right on time):

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in this post diane mentions two books on memory that might be interesting to look at in the future…

Décès de Jean Baudrillard, pourfendeur de la société de consommation et des médias:
Décès de Jean Baudrillard, pourfendeur de la société de consommation et des médias

Jean Baudrillard • DR

Le sociologue et philosophe est décédé mardi à Paris, à l’âge de 77 ans •

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two online encyclopedia entries about baudrillard:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Baudrillard
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http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/baudrillard/

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Other obituaries:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/07/books/07baudrillard.html

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http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3382,36-879957@51-879918,0.html

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http://www.repubblica.it/2007/03/sezioni/spettacoli_e_cultura/volpi-baudrillard/volpi-baudrillard/volpi-baudrillard.html

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Some responses from my friends, colleagues and people i read in the blogosphere:

Jean Baudrillard, RIP
Noted French philosopher Jean Baudrillard dies
RIP Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard 20th June 1929 – 6th March 2007
baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard, sociologue et philosophe (1929-2007)
Baudrillard writes his own epitaph.
This post does not exist. (RIP Jean Baudrillard)
Jean Baudrillard: Rest In Peace
The death of reality
Baudrillard is Dead
Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007)
Jean Baudrillard, 1929-2007
R.I.P. Jean Baudrillard
Baudrillard Dies
Simulacrummy.
Farewell, Jean Baudrillard! I loved…
Baudrillard’s passing
Baudrillard Is Dead
losing another “abstruse” french theorist
Jean is dead 15/40
Encountering the Real
Jean Baudrillard’s Death Did Not Take Place

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yes i read too many blogs, but that’s life..

It is in relation to baudrillard that i have pursued some of my obscure interests… like pataphysics, oulipo, the origins of structuralism. He is why I work in semiology and discourse analysis, beyond the fact that… so do my friends and colleagues. he’s a major figure in my history, and the focus of one of my independent studies in graduate school.